"I feel most proud when a young woman or sometimes even a little girl will come up to me after a talk and say that she felt more confident or more proud of who she was when she saw me on the daily show or when she watched my TedTalk and sent it to all her friends and to be in anyway a vehicle to help young women, young Muslim women, young women of color to feel a little bit more confident in who they are because they see someone they relate to, reflected back at them and from platforms that they admire. Makes me feel incredibly proud and it makes the work I do much much more fulfilling."
​What gave you the confidence?

What I end up doing is not so much feeling confident rather than feeling very responsible. And that’s what really pushes me to do things that are uncomfortable… very uncomfortable for me.

It’s a calling. It’s a responsibility. I feel like I have to do the best I can to honor that responsibility and to represent.

If any of us are given that kind of a platform or a seat at the table, we have to know that we are not just sitting there representing our own selfish interest. We are not just sitting there or up there representing our own career advancement goals. We are there because God has chosen us to fulfill a responsibility, not because we are better but because that happens to be the journey that He has chosen for us and because of that we have to know that we have to make all of those other people who weren’t there, who didn’t get that chance. Feel like they may have also been heard in some way.

I guess where I get my strength or where I get my courage to overcome the fear of messing up, of failure, of embarrassing myself, of getting it wrong when I’m in such visible platforms is the knowledge that I am not there representing myself and that it is not about me.

What is propelling me?

A sense of duty

A sense of responsibility

A sense of gratitude

I think of it as a test.

Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) understood thegravity of that callingso it is not something is rushing toward. And I think in the same way, public service or a public life is something that we should not take lightly.

Any kind of leadership position should be something that has to be seen a position ofstewardship and service and duty and a burden and a difficulty. It isn’t something I think anyone should make light of or think as by any means fun or glamorous. If it is fun and glamorous then something probably doing it wrong.

Starting point of any public role:

To really think a lot about the communities you want to serve.

The idea you want to gift people with and the communities you want to serve

It should be a struggle of wanting to serve overcoming your reluctance and fear of the burden or of the responsibility. (healthy approach to public service or public life)Power or recognition or fame is very dangerous for ones soul. I think you really have to learn to hate it in order to survive having it and not let it hurt you internally.The truth is there for anyone who wants to find it.If you want to believe something that it isn’t true then that’s... I’m not going to be able to stop that.

Truth:My truth is I consider myself as seeker. And I don’t think I have a truth, I have the desire to seek truth and to speak truth when I find it.
​I do believe that the primary purpose of religion is to save us from ourselvesand to forge a path where our selfish interests are made secondary to universal truths and principles.What keeps you going? What wakes you up every morning?Is to continue to walk in that kind of a path…

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